[youtube]JVRsWAjvQSg[/youtube]
This is a very interesting discussion on the subject of Intelligent Design by Brown University’s Kenneth Miller. It’s just under two hours long, and if you have the time I highly recommend watching it. There is even a mention of Pastafarianism at around 90 minutes.
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An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny. -- Scientific American
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@Dr DPG
“True. But you could place the ring of superconducting material on a satelite. Space is horribly cold, you woudn’t have to cool it at all to keep it superconducting.”…
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That’s cheating…we need this the size of a shoe box under the bonnet of a car…I could also just use the sun to heat a cell to cool the rings…come on DPG…I want to be blown away by cutting edge massive brain science…
@Wench Thumper
“That’s cheating…we need this the size of a shoe box under the bonnet of a car”
That’s no use inside a car. Things will only keep moving if you don’t take out the energy somehow. So you can’t drive a car with it. Each time you accelerate, you’d take out energy and that will not be spontaneously replaced. That’s probably the most consistent ‘no free lunch’ law in all of physics: conservation of energy. Beat that, and the Noble prize is yours for sure. In the process of winning the Noble prize, you’ll also have brought down all of physics as we know it today btw.
The important lesson to learn from this post is the following: perpetual motion means constant energy. Perpetual motion does NOT mean unlimited energy.
@Dr DPG
“Not sure if the future Mrs Thumper would like you to tell too much about that……”…you’re correct…but that’s also one of the things she loves about me…my irreverent sense of humour…she does get a bit “funny” about her sordid past…ha ha…in point of fact she modeled “adult” garments for sex shops on severalo occasions…lucky she loves me heaps…but seriously…she now 32 and that was all….5 years ago….a life time…
Does she ever read here on CoFSM?
@Dr DPG
“The important lesson to learn from this post is the following: perpetual motion means constant energy. Perpetual motion does NOT mean unlimited energy.”…
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I don’t get it…if we can move the turbine perpetually why can we harvest it???…friction???…in space there is no friction or inertia…there must be a way!!!…Do you believe that you will ever win a Nobel prize for something??? If not why???…People like you Peter have the ability to make massive beneficial changes to the world we live in…think outside the box…*wabbit is naive and had too much to drink…yet remains hopeful*
Oh FSM, this is getting a little too high for me. Loved chemistry, but I always sucked in physics. But, DPG, when you mentioned cold fusion: I thought it was impossible to hold a circular magnetic field, because of the polarities… don’t laugh if I sound silly in this high conversation… :(
@Dr DPG
“Does she ever read here on CoFSM?”…read yes…post no…she thinks this is “silly”…we have no secrets and she respects my love of the FSM and it’s faithful…she posted once ages ago…she was smashed and McOar gave her a caning….suffice to say wabbit appeared in shining armour and bested the wretch…errr…by wretch I mean…errr…what the hell…McOar will never like me…I bested the wretch…
Hello Enya…I actually failed year 11 Chem and thought I’d give physics a miss on principle…fear not wading in without wellingtons…
:)
@Wench Thumper
“I don’t get it…if we can move the turbine perpetually why can we harvest it???…friction???…in space there is no friction or inertia…there must be a way!!!…”
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No, the reason is that your friction-less turbine will only keep moving if you don’t touch it. The moment you e. g. couple it to the wheels of your car, you take out energy from the turbine. So it slows down, eventually it stops as you continue to drain energy from it. So it won’t be of great practical use: you can watch the turbine spin forever, but only if you don’t extract energy from it. Sucks, doesn’t it?
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“Do you believe that you will ever win a Nobel prize for something??? If not why???…People like you Peter have the ability to make massive beneficial changes to the world we live in…think outside the box…*wabbit is naive and had too much to drink…yet remains hopeful*”
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I won’t win any Noble prize. The work I do is academic research yet somewhat ‘applied’. Maybe ‘non-theoretical’ is a better word. What I do may well prove useful to others in the future. Or maybe not, maybe it will all be forgotten. But it certainly won’t revolutionise any field of physics. And the bar for a Noble prize in physics is awfully high. You need to revolutionise at least one field. But several people manage to do that occasionally, so that’s still no guarantee. Do something that revolutionises two fields, and then you can get your hopes up. I won’t revolutionise one field, let alone two.
@Dr DPG
“But it certainly won’t revolutionise any field of physics. And the bar for a Noble prize in physics is awfully high. You need to revolutionise at least one field. But several people manage to do that occasionally, so that’s still no guarantee”…
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certainly not with that attitude…another friend of mine who is a gardener has a saying…”if you reach for the stars you may not catch them but at least you won’t come up with a hand full of mud”…never underestimate what you do…if you handed Da Vinci a TV we wouldn’t have had TV any earlier…point is that it’s the advances made every day that add to the wealth of knowledge that drives us forward as a species…you my friend are an integral cog in that wheel…come what may…
@Enya
Always hide the “green dream”…animals are people to…
I meant “cog” in the machine….wheels have no “cogs”…damn scientists…fancy cars and all the rock badger they can eat…
@Enya
I’m not sure if I understand your question. You can maintain a magnetic field in a toroidal ring for instance. That’s like a rather thin donut with copper wires wrapped around it. If you put a current throught the wires, it will generate a magnetic field inside the ‘donut’. So that’s one way of creating a circular magnetic field.
Another (quite simple) way is to take a number of long-shaped magnets and lay them down in a way that all the + and - poles connect and the magnets make approximately a circle. Many of the magnetic field lines would just pass from the end of one magnet into the next. So if you arranged the magnets in a circle, you’ve now got a circular magnetic field.
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You may have meant something else?
@Wench Thumper
“certainly not with that attitude”
Trust me, I’m not suffering from a lack of confidence (check out my annoyingly arrogant post when debating Johnny Corvette on an older thread if you don’t believe me). But Nobel prizes are not for everyone. There’s people in my group at work who are a good bit more intelligent than I am. They won’t win any Noble prizes either. It’s not something to be embarresed about if you didn’t win one.
DPG I just heard that they try to do fusions in a magnetic ‘ball’ (=all around, not just a ring), but the problem was, that the different polarities are bond to touch each other in a circle., so that the magnetic field won’t be stable inside the ball… oh it is so hard to explain, but maybe the solution is a Donut ;)
@Dr DPG
…you need to assert your salutation…i.e. Dr DPG…when Enya said…”I thought it was impossible to hold a circular magnetic field, because of the polarities…”…as a lay wabbit I thought she was referring to + and - not being able to be contained within a circular configuration….but then again…I also thought that Laura Mars was a show about colonisation of alien worlds…
@Enya
As I am a materials scientist, not a nuclear physicist, I don’t know the stuff well enough to pick up the right bits from your post. You probaly say it clear enough, but I don’t know it well enough to understand where you’re going.
Why not antimatter as an energy storage media? IIRC, CERN was able to manufacture and store antiprotons(I think) for some time. There is the whole “Total conversion w/ hard radiation” problem when containment is breached, but still…
@Wench Thumper
“you need to assert your salutation…i.e. Dr DPG”
No, definately not. In a scientific debate, the first thing you do is to leave your title at the door. A first year PhD student can ask the correct question to a professor who is a leader in his field. If the professor can’t answer it, it’s scientifically very bad if he were to stamp out the discussion based on his title. If someone is asking questions that show a complete ignorance you can ask the person if he is familiar with the basic concepts of course. But (good) science is non-hierarchical. The person with the best ideas deserves the most attention. That will often be the famous professors in the field, but not always. In fact, if you’re a young researcher and you ask the questions that well-established people can’t answer, you’re on your way to gaining a reputation. So let’s not have too much salutation around.
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Ok, I’m going home now, catch you people later.
@Dr DPG
“There’s people in my group at work who are a good bit more intelligent than I am.”…and Einstein was a patent clerk…DPG I’m not suggesting you lack confidence or anything like that…I guess that I’m just a little envious of people who have the mind that can understand scientific concepts in the vein of applied physics…a PhD in anything is one hell of an achievement…I can understand the science community “press releases” but I have no ability to make head nor tail of the “meat and potatoes” of it all…*confused wabbit = MC…* I don’t even know how to make my ‘puter do the squared thing…